Re-Framing Ambition

Yes, I’ll admit it I wanted to be one of those women who had it all. The husband, the family, the career. It all seemed so very glamorous.

And let’s be honest, a day at the office is way easier than caring for a baby. The years ticked by and two kids and a cross-country move we thought we had it all, two careers and two healthy kids.

It was a balancing act, both jobs required us to travel but we made a rule that we’d never both travel at once. It worked, even if my husband and I were literally never in the same city. We’d have crazy days where one of us would fly in in the morning and the other out that night. But wasn’t this ‘having it all?’

The summers would give us time to relax the travel but by Labor Day we’d be back on schedule. And it was the week after Labor Day that we had our senior leadership meeting every year. That week when the schools go back, and handily my younger daughter and I both have birthdays.

So as I left our New York apartment to head off to the West coast I knew exactly what I’d be missing: my elder daughter’s first day at kindergarten and two birthdays.

The week away was emotional but pretty uneventful: calls for the birthdays and details from my husband about the new teacher and first days at school.

On Friday night I returned home to find a letter from my daughter’s new teacher addressed to my husband and our nanny. Yes, really.

Of course it was a silly mistake, the teacher could have looked up and addressed the letter correctly, but that didn’t really matter. How I felt was what mattered.

And it ‘hit’ me, quite simply I wasn’t being the mother I wanted to be. Nor the mother I believed our kids needed.

I was stunned at how struck I was by the kindergarten milestone, I didn’t expect it to feel this important. It wasn’t so much kindergarten, rather knowing that now my daughter was thrilled to be with me and pleaded for me to take her to school.

The first five years had gone so fast…. And yet there would only be five more before she’d be a middle schooler, embarrassed by her mother and pleading her not to take her to school. Time seemed very short indeed.

But the thing is, ambition doesn’t go away. And whilst I was prepared to change my career I didn’t lose sight of my career goals, I simply knew I was going to need another way to fulfill them at this particular point in my life. I was going to need to re-define what work looked like. Having it all, just not all at once.